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theodp writes "A conversation with an angry young developer prompts Microsoft Program Manager Scott Hanselman to blog about 'Microsoft Haters: The Next Generation.' 'The ones I find the most interesting,' says Hanselman, are the 'Microsoft killed my Pappy' people, angry with generational anger. My elders hated Microsoft so I hate them. Why? Because, you wronged me.' The U.S. and Japan managed to get over the whole World War II thing, Hanselman notes, so why can't people manage to get past the Microsoft antitrust thing, which was initiated in 1998 for actions in 1994? 'At some point you let go,' he suggests, 'and you start again with fresh eyes.' Despite the overall good-humored, why-can't-we-get-along tone of his post, Hanselman can't resist one dig that seems aimed at putting things into perspective for those who would still Slashdot like it's 1999: 'I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome OS or Mobile Safari in iOS.'"

Yes. I thought the introduction of user forums would finally help MS to close the gap with the the users. But it didn't. Threads gets deleted. Bugs get labeled as "features". Botched OSes gets released.

People can't get past MS's sins because MS never really changed. They still bend the rules until they're warped and often just snap. They are still they same company in many ways.

I work for a software company that need to relate to/work with MS, and Apple, and Google. And from our end they have definitely changed, and that is what I'm hearing from others in the industry as well. They have learned a lesson and are much easier to work with, more flexible and communicative, less arrogant. Apple and Google on the other hand, from an industry perspective they have really taken over the "my way or the highway" arrogance leadership MS used to have, are difficult to work with and can do things that torpedo partners, without communication or remorse. The stuff MS used to do. Not an end-user perspective, but still, a major change of hats.

They're less arrogant and more flexible because they have lost power, not because they have learned any lesson or changed in any way. If they find themselves in a position of power they will abuse it again, and if they can screw you and gain from it when nobody's looking, you're going to get screwed.

Not forgetting how they will behave with power and keeping track when the company's nature rears its head again is part of keeping them from doing it again.

Maybe once they've kept their nose clean for half a century, but this far they haven't even managed two days.

"The thing I hate the most about their products they do not have a monopoly on: selling managers framework systems whose major purpose seems to be to coax the customer into a situation where buying more stuff is the easiest solution. "

Are you talking about Microsoft? or IBM? or Oracle? or Cisco? or everyone?

Hear hear. I can "get over" the German complicity in the Holocaust because the people that actually committed the atrocities are mostly dead, and the country has gone to great lengths to reduce the chances it will ever happen again.

Microsoft on the other hand is still mostly the same people continuing to act in mostly the same way, including going far out of their way to attempt end-runs around any attempt to limit their potential abusiveness, even at the risk of great societal costs in unrelated areas (Completely undermining the integrity of the IEEE Standards Association to get OOXML approved springs to mind)

s a business tactic, Microsoft's behaviors have been often very effective. I'd refrain from mentioning older thefts by Microsoft except these are at the core of what they sell now: The NT kernel, at the core of Windows 8 and Windows Server, was extensively VMS code stolen from DEC, and DEC bent bankrupt after that. The browser standards wars continue to include "embrace, extend, and break compatibility". The entire "OOXML" debacle of "publishing open standards" for Microsoft Office document standards, then ignoring them for actual MS Office software is an ongoing example. Microsoft Office violates its own standards, and the standards were themselves corrupted, to allow Microsoft to claim "open standards" compatibility which it doesn't actually have.

And then there's "Trusted Computing". The entire ongoing project is not aimed at user privacy: it's aimed at vendor lockin for software, data, and even hardware. And the private keys, including keys to revoke other keys, are held almost entirely in escrow by Microsoft, with no usable guarantees of the keys protection from wholesale abuse.

NT started out as a rewrite of OS/2, written by ex-VMS developers, not stolen as MS got ver 3 in the divorce and NT started out as OS/2 NT ver 3.Up until W2K it still had the OS/2 16 bit subsystem and ran OS/2 ver 1.x textmode software fine and you could get a Presentation Manager layer as well to run ver 1.x graphical apps. I also have a Byte magazine article around somewhere about them getting the 32 bit Presentation Manager running under NT so if OS/2 had won the OS war they were ready with their version.

Completely undermining?!? You should really look up how standards are made, how many of those there are and why OOXML isn't worse than anything. Really, why is that a problem for you unless you are a rabid MS-hater?

On the contrary, everyone around at the time of MS's corruption of the standards bodies is well aware of the corruption. You didn't need to be a hater, it was everywhere in the tech news.

Now are you denying it because you are too young to remember, or because you're an apologist?

I don't know. Watching Microsoft's blatant attack on open standards was really informative of how nothing there has changed other than they do attempt to stay under the radar when they can. If you don't understand how we have a problem with this Corporation trying to destroy open standards I can only describe you as a rabid MS-shill.

Microsoft hasn't changed, they just get caught less, and have currently have incompetent(ballmer) Leadership.

Until Microsoft stops trying to kill everything that's not microsoft and actually adopt open standards they will be horrible. Apple is just as bad but apple has to use more open standards in order to compete.

Its everyone now. Its every device, every OS except SOME versions of linux. I hate not just Microsoft, but Apple, Samsung, Sony and many many others. In todays software and hardware OVER 50% OF THE BUDGETS FOR EVERYTHING ELECTRONIC, is spent researching and implementing systems and technologies that keep me from being able to use my devices in any way other than a way that generates revenue., They are not even satisfied with one time revenue stream, but now even cripple THINGS so they can sell them back as a service to generate a continuous revenue stream. The days of geeks owning their devices/computers is over and I resent that beyond belief. There really isn't any single place that anyone can go and get rid of this completely, so I can't even truly vote with my pocketbook. I just simply have to buy the electronics that are LEAST riddled with any technology that exists for the sole purpose to limit my capability/creativity in some way. When Microsoft become less concerned about Metro walled gardens or killing the video stream if something looks fishy to THEM on MY computer then I'll go back to using Microsoft or other vendors.

People can't get past MS's sins because MS never really changed. They still bend the rules until they're warped and often just snap. They are still they same company in many ways.

Let's see for a moment of today vs 1990s1999:-MS makes IE incompatible on purpose to destroy the last innovation left-MS strong arms OEM's-MS makes crappy products that crash. Though NT 4 shows some promise-MS makes bad things in standards like it's own versions of C++ and.doc.xls formats to prevent others from using them. A bad buggy product creates lockin as developers rely on their products hence IE 6 is still here in a few spots-MS owns the ecosystem! Apple is dead. Palm is about dead and will be dyin

IE browser breaks formerly compliant sites with each release.almost no one wants a windows phone, Android and Apple dominate the market. Micosoft lost the mobile space because they don't innovate.ribbon is garbage, layers have unrelated random things, it is not designed to do any work or have a workflow. it is not discoverable. only simpletons who do very menial work find ribbon suitable.GNU C++ runs on over a dozen architectures, microsoft C++ only a fewMicrosoft owns the ecosystem of mediocrity and pandering to morons. those that want true functional operating system run alternatives.Micsoft does not innovate, they are reactionary and make inferior alternatives. example of powershell instead of usable real OS shell.

The Linux distros continue to make significant headway, by any measure you care to apply, except dollar measures. So long as they stay healthy, which looks like a very long time, there will be no duopoly.

There is, though, a group of people who ignore the Linux distros while talking loudly about the health of the digital markets. While this group is diminishing in number it remains quite loud, because it can talk about dollar value, which has a way of catching everyone's attention. The thing is, the value

The funny thing is, Ubuntu was poised and could have taken the desktop, but they brought out their own version of Metro before Microsoft did.

We are a victim of the "Designer". The "Designer" isn't a critical thinker who solves problems. They're not a project manager who understands the needs of the people doing the work. They're not process improvement specialists.

They're fucking ARTISTS.

Here's their job:

In these stories, there is always an executive. He makes the decision if things will go ahead. But, he never sullies his hands with tools like ordinary people, and has no real understanding of how things get done or what qualities a tool should have. He's completely ignorant as to what SHOULD be done, like the designer, and he's too full of himself to learn what he needs to know. So, if he can, he green lights the project that was brought to him by a slutty blonde, and if there's no slutty blonde, he green lights the pretty looking project and goes home.

That's how these things work.

So, when you're looking at Metro, and Unity, and Gnome3, and wondering what the hell happened to the powerful tools you rely upon and used to love...

The landscape has changed, but not enough. Microsoft have engineered a situation where the majority of people have little chance of finding a PC without Windows, thus ensuring Microsoft an income which they can spend a percentage of to maintain status-quo. And based on previous stories, it appears Microsoft is even getting subsidized from the sales of certain devices with no Microsoft software on them.

Until deciding not to pay anymore money to Microsoft is a real option for consumers, I am going to see Microsoft as a problem, that needs to be solved.

They may have been fined for their practices. But the fines are not nearly as large as the value of the position they gotten themselves through those practices.

But right now it is effectively MS vs. Google, which might be much worse. Because duopolies generally are worse than monopolies.

I disagree. I believe things would have looked much worse today, if MS had not been having competition from Google.

It is much easier for a consumer not to pay any money to Google than it is for a consumer not to pay any money to Microsoft. It is also not hard to use another search engine than Google. But every time I try, I find that both the search results and the UI tend to be worse. So I always come back to the Google search engine, just because it really seems to work better for me. As long as it is that easy to switch to another search engine, I am not worried about Google being able to maintain their position simply by making a better product than their competitors.

Sure Google makes moves, I disagree with. But not enough to put them behind their competitors. I am actually more worried about Yahoo and bing getting too close, leaving us with one less competitor for Google.

I certainly would not give Apple, Facebook or Google a pass. But none of they have yet earned the reputation for foul play that Microsoft has.

I can't think of how many times I've heard comparisons asking "Is X the Microsoft of the Y world?" Microsoft has set the bar for being underhanded and abusing a Monopolistic position and have done so to such an extreme to be Godwin worthy. You want to talk about facism you compare to the nazis. You want to talk employee abuse you talk EA or Foxconn. You want to talk monopolistic abuse, you go to Microsoft.

They've worked hard earning that reputation and actually had to wrestle it way from others. You don't just expect that to be forgotten.

I was a long-term MS hater but google has taken spot #1 for my big company mistrust and hate.

I know what MS is up to. they sell software and I'm their customer.

google does not consider me a customer and so I am not part of the 'sales cycle' at all, I have no say in what happens and I can't even get any support if google fucks my shit up.

if you are the product, you are the lowest down on the food chain.

consumers were never the product with MS. that counts for a lot, actually.

MS is shady and I would not trust them very far, but my trust level with google is a solid flat ZERO. MS is, at least, more than zero, even if not by all that much.

apple, while we're at it, is even less trustworthy than MS, these days. its anyone's guess what info they want to mine from your i-devices and the totally closed ecosystem is a huge turn-off to many of us.

funny thought: if I had to pick a tee shirt from the 3 companies mentioned - and wear it at least a few times to work - it would probably be an MS shirt. google and apple can go fuck themselves, I would not be caught dead advertising them. strange thought from a hardcore unix guy like myself, but the times HAVE changed and what was the big evil guy before is not the worst one on the block anymore.

You can pretty much assume every company is collecting as much information from you as possible. Just because you're also giving them money doesn't change anything. At least with Google they tell you what they collect and what they do with it. And unlike most companies, Google doesn't sell this information.

Not that you should trust Google, but the "they're spying on me so X company is better" logic just doesn't hold up.

You aren't Google's product. You are the value in Google's product. It's a subtle, yet vital, distinction.

Google's products are, from a general perspective, business intelligence services. They sell search appliances to help companies manage their documents. They sell mapping and location services to help manage logistics. They also sell ad-placement services to put ads in places where they're most likely to result in a sale.

All of those products rely on understanding human behavior, to varying degrees. Of course, since humans love to lie so much, the best way to get that understanding is by direct observation. Google watches what you search for, what roads you prefer, and what your purchasing interests are. You are not the product. Google doesn't give a damn about you personally. Google only cares about your behavior patterns, at a statistical level, to improve its real products.

Personally, I prefer this to Microsoft's usual extortion tactics, and I also prefer it to the competitive ideal of many small companies, where each one provides only a small part of a viable solution. I'll start to worry when Google starts buying competitors just to shut them down, but until then I must admit I like what I see.

The Microsoft of old doesn't seem to be any worse than the Apple of today. Windows at least lets you run anything you like on it, while iOS is locked down to only run Apple approved apps. Microsoft abused their position to crush Netscape by integrating IE into Windows, but Apple doesn't even allow other non-Apple rendering engines and keeps the highest performance code exclusive to Safari. Microsoft tried lock people in with its proprietary formats, Apple has proprietary formats (e.g. iTunes database) and locks out non-approved 3rd party peripherals.

Microsoft tried to pack in their own services like MSN, Apple packs in its own services and excludes others (e.g. the app store). It's like Apple got all their ideas from Microsoft and improved on them.

How locked down was Zune, how locked down is RT, how is it that the PC platform is becoming more locked down than Apple hardware?

We'd be in much better shape in a world where PPC and Alpha desktop computers were competing with ARM for marketshare, with OF still a relevant standard (rather than just having remnants left behind in the Linux kernel), rather than the total hash that's x86, BIOS, MBR, EFI.

The Apple partition map presaged GPT, OF (which Apple embraced) presaged EFI, all of it quite open. A large part of OSX is open source, and the documentation of everything is superb (I remember when the big criticism of MacOS was that you needed THREE VOLUMES of documentation to cover everything! I still have the phonebook version).

Since no one has mentioned it: Word was awesome. I remember when people bought Macs (classic) to run Word. For all the geek love for WordPerfect, it wasn't the one with mainstream appeal.

Also, Windows95 was some amazing technology. Sure, every geek in the world had and has good reason to hate it, as it was just so terrible to administer. But it was exactly the product needed to bridge the gap between the segmented memory, non-multi-tasking, no memory protection model that was the norm before it to the true 32-bit, flat memory model with process boundaries and pre-emptive multitasking world that only existed on servers at the time. It was such a crap OS to maintain and administer precisely because it could run freaking 16-bit device drivers written to a no-memory-protection world inside a 32-bit (relatively) modern kernel. There were better options, but none of them would run the existing world of DOS, too

People act like it's MS's monopolistic practices that they hate but seriously, it's the fact the we geeks collectively had to support Win95 that's the raw emotional core of the hate. And it won because it solved the right problem: it was backwards compatible instead of good.

No, and you're an idiot. Win95 was bad, but it was a long time ago, and most people who hate Microsoft consider that simply among the many sins committed.

Did you get IE11? Did you notice how the "Developer Tools" are now "Tablet user semi-tools"?

Have you upgraded to VS2012? Did you notice how your workflow is now *harder* unless you use a touch device?

Have you tried to change the color of bullets when you paste something in Word? Fuck me, the Word editor is probably the definition of torture. If you use your keyboard at all, it will fuck your eyeballs with a cactus.

Do you have something after Windows 7? Did you notice how Windows is designed around touch users, despite the fact that business desktops are a huge part of both Microsoft's current user base as well as future upgrades due to subscriptions? Server 2013 using the same touch-optimized interface?

Now we get the "Spring" update for Windows 8.1, which supposedly addresses the 90+% of the market still using desktops but that they completely forgot about during design, and it's named for a season which, while correct for most of the inhabited world, still disregards anything outside of their immediate vision.

Microsoft does not see existing customers. It sees future markets. Bundling IE and lying about it was certainly about future markets.Claiming IE was part of the system, and forcing Active Desktop on users, was about future markets.

90% of the user base that uses a desktop is not in their scope until it threatens the sales numbers. We get a token "start button" that does not do what we obviously wanted. Later, we get promises of a "start button". The timing of this pretty much says it all. The customer is paid for, the future customer is not. The current customer sometimes has to be appeased, but they will be shat upon if the future consumer base demands it.

I have used Windows all of my life. I am stupid in that way, apparently. My reasons were based around popularity and market share, and my understanding of its internals was so precipitated. I suffered through having a half-assed 32-bit OS thunked to the Windows 95 and 98 kernel. I used Windows 2000 at home because XP used unnecessary eye candy. I upgraded to a faster computer, and XP3 phoned home even as a paid customer.

I suffered through unpaid license fees to Dinkumware, meaning my code broke until I traced it to broken STL includes that would never be included in a service pack update. That was 1999. Yet I built a good career on Microsoft technologies, precisely because my knowledge and experience make me more valuable than the average Microsoft worker.

I have seen my rapist many times. Do I love him now, and forget him now? While I see the same tricks played over and over? Do I forgive the company for its past wrongs even though I see the exact same behavior? Do I forgive the alcoholic who reaches for another drink? The crack addict with a burning pipe to its lips?

No, I fucking well don't. And all of this went well beyond Windows 95.

"The landscape has changed. And some people want to be optimistic about it. "

Give me a break. The MS "landscape" hasn't change a f*ing bit, except that their UI designing seem to be far more incompetent than in the late 90s.

As discusses here on Slashdot just the other day, Microsoft is trying to get political over OOXML again with the government in the UK.

If that's a "changed landscape", I'm a baboon.

They still try to muscle, bully, and bullshit their way into your pocketbook. They still do just about everything they can to get around any real competition in the market.

I'd like to be optimistic, too. I just don't see much of anything to be optimistic about. Except maybe Internet Explorer. After a decade and a half (or maybe more), they're finally starting to work with (and catch up to) standards, rather than trying to dictate those standards and stifle progress. But... 15 years is an awful long time to read the writing that has been on the wall the entire time.

With a monopoly everybody know where they stand. You either with them - or against them. And if the monopolist is really bad, then opposition would form in the industry.

Duopoly creates illusion of competition. It also sets the false perception of the choice and that anything beyond the two choices is not possible. The simulated market saturation also makes investors nervous about investing into alternatives. That allows participants of the duopoly to slow the innovation: there is no danger of competition; the only competitor is very likely thinking the same as you and also tries to maximize the profits by cutting the costs. Throw in the patent cross-licensing deals, and you literally have no way to crack the duopoly. For as long as they do not openly cooperate, you can't prosecute them under anti-trust laws.

Microsoft of itself is neither evil nor benign. It is the people who have shaped Microsoft's corporate culture and policies who can be judged in that way.

Microsoft's behavior became somewhat less obnoxious when Bill Gates stepped away from the daily management of the company. That still left the potty-mouthed, chair throwing, murder threatening, monkey dancer in charge. But he is now going away, too.

So maybe Microsoft will become respectable, at some point. Or maybe not-- there are deeply rooted corporate cultures that can make it impossible for good persons to survive long enough to make a difference.

Well, I do have some knowledge of industrial history. Just because others did murder in the past is no excuse for MS to steal and cheat now. And they are doing it, right now. No, MS has not gone straight, not turned over a new leaf in the past few years. This is not a matter of let bygones be bygones.

That brutal industrial history is a mark of shame for the entire system of capitalism. Every time one might think the bad old days are gone, we get another reminder. Another coal mine "incident" kills dozens of minors. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The most deadly of all, so far, is what Union Carbide did in Bhopal in 1984. How about the story of the Radium Girls? The management knew radium was dangerous, and kept themselves clear, but not their workers.

Maybe communism wouldn't have been so attractive if not for the excesses of the capitalists. What kind of system leads rich tycoons to become so callously indifferent to the lives of "little" people? Then our court system fails to adequately punish and deter this kind of behavior.

For years, anyone who tried to buy a music player that could play the Ogg Vorbis format would have no luck in the US, thanks to Microsoft trying to kill competition to their WMA format. The very same hardware, such as the Samsung Yepp YP-U2 music player, had different code in the ROM between Europe and the US, with the European version able to play Ogg Vorbis, and the US version not.

Another dirty stunt was Microsoft's support of SCO Unix when they tried to extort license fees from innocent users of Linux, which dragged on through 2008.

The thing about not being able to swap out IE was, that Microsoft claimed it could not be done - and was a true monopoly at the time, where it basically affected everyone.

With Sarai/OSX, it's a whole different matter - OSX does not have 90% market penetration. And if it did, Apple could not claim you could not swap out WebKit from the system since it's open source that's well documented - in fact you CAN swap in more recent, or custom, builds of Webkit into OSX quite easily.

Reading comprehension WTF - he was talking about Mobile Safari/iOS. While it is true that you can have alternativish-browsers on iOS, they must use the underlying Webkit component and a markedly inferior JS engine. So there's an element of truth in the statement.

You can swap it out if you've jailbroken, or simply write your own app with any engine you like (which works fine for personal or enterprise use).

This point I've never quite fully understood - people keep complaining about how insecure Android is (which is a debate for another thread). Yet when discussing shortcomings of iOS, the answer is always "jailbreak" (which might or might not be available, tethered or perhaps not). As it is, at work I've been developing an app for iPad that is HTML5-based. And the performance is worse than what Mobile Safari would offer. If you want your HTML5 app available on the App store, this is a fact you'll just have to

For starters, you can find Opera in the official Mac App Store, Chrome & Opera in the official iOS store... Prior to the App Store you could always easily find alternative browsers via the 'Get software...' links that Apple included.

You don't know the definition of what a monopoly is. Perhaps YOU should read the letter of the law. The fact is Microsoft forced manufacturers in Asia to drop BeOS and Linux desktops and laptops because if they did not do that their Windows licensing costs would increase. In fact that is the reason some people think Sony dropped their laptop business altogether. They just don't want to bother dealing with Microsoft anymore if they can avoid it.

The shell is a BIG part of the OS. I'm not sure most of the complainers actually know what they are saying

Only because MS designed it that way, and their reasons for designing that way had nothing to do with providing a "better" solution for the end user. It had everything to do with designing a system that was so tightly integrated that various parts could not be substituted. MS wanted to do everything they could to prevent third parties from offering replacements for part of their OS, as that would ultimately undermine their monopoly. A properly designed system has all of the parts compartmentalized so that individual parts can be replaced so long as they conform to the apropriate APIs. This is true for programs, electrical designs, buildings, mechanical structures, everything engineering related. MS deliberatly ignored centuries of engineering best practices to build their monstrocity. Just look how difficult it has been to create a stable eumlator for windows (wine). We have excelent DOS emulators, excelent PS2, Wii, etc emulators, but Windows remains the one place we do not have a good emulator. This is because it was built to be belidgerant...

MS was never properly punished for their behavior, either by the market, nor the regulatory bodies. Consequently, they think they are above the law (Hence Windows 8). I for one will not be satisifed until MS is wiped from this earth and Gates and Balmer are safely away from their Ill gotten fortune.

Nobody said they had to remove the actual rendering code, but that they had to remove the "explorer is Internet Explorer" functionality (though the code being removed as proof of removal was brought up later after judgments against MS). If a URL typed in at the explorer window would have opened in the default browser, rather than forcing IE above default settings, they probably would have weathered challenges better. Even if they had to call IE long enough to call the default browser and then close IE (wi

"People can't seem to get past the antitrust trial"? The one where Microsoft forged evidence and pissed off the first judge so bad that she was replaced on account of the bias they had created? The one that ultimately said, clearly, YES microsoft's business practices are bad for both the individual and the nation?

Yeah, poor Stalin! People never could get past those purge-things he got famous for.

I think his point is that the decision to lock consumers into IE was made almost two decades ago, so people born since then should be looking for other reasons to dislike Microsoft. I will concede that Microsoft has lost their leadership position in anti-consumer practices and pretty much everyone has caught up to them now.

Yes, exactly. Windows 8 is highly hated. Take away the user paradign for the last 30 years and what do you expect?

I occasionally have to use Windows, and I'm amazed that the user experience has actually gotten much worse from about 10 years ago. I can't figure out how to use the damn thing anymore! Office was perfected about 10 years ago, but yet MS just keeps changing the UI around and re-selling the thing over and over, then tying it into other MS products so you have to buy the damn thing again.

No, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad design, but when you hear a chorus of people complaining about the same thing, it's highly suggestive that it is. Both Windows and Ubuntu tried the crazy menu thing and elimating the start menu. Both had to relent and go back. That's a pretty shitty design, and shows both of them weren't thinking.

IMO the UI architects have become too radical for desktop UIs. Many complain the deskop UI hasn't changed in 20 years.... as if that's a bad thing. The UI to my car hasn't changed either. Steering wheel, brake, accelerator, ignition, gearshift all in standard locations. Headlight switches move around, which seems to serve little purpose, but it's a relatively minor complaint. A stable UI isn't necesarily a bad thing, but if you look at how much UIs have changed in MS products, you'd think they change it more often than hairstyles.

Meanwhile 20 years ago I learned shell programming and some simple unix piping output between standard programs, and I've gotten quite good at manipuating the command line. I don't have to re-learn it all every 5 years because someone thought of a "better" way to do it. At the same time I don't really want to go back to manipulating endless system config files with a text editor, or using freaking tar/zip as a package management tool. If a UI improvement solves an actual problem I'm all for it, it's just the stuff MS has done lately doesn't seem to solve any problems, only create them.

To me moving around the UI components is sort of like re-arranging furniture. It might help a bit, but if you want a happier user there's better ways to go about that. If you want to keep the system up to date... instead of forcing the damn machine to restart, why not just re-engineer your system so you don't have to restart? Email really stinks.. mostly because it's a big box with different time requirements for different emails. Why not address that problem instead of putting a fancy ribbon on everything?

The hate comes from MS being a dominant player, a position that often leads them to become complacent or makes them behave like the school bully. The latter is what that antitrust case was about, but we have more recent examples as well. Windows 8, for starters. They pushed through with their almost universally hated paradigm for a unified desktop / tablet experience. Then came Windows 8.1 which "brought back Start" in the sense that it really didn't; MS pretty much cheerfully flipped us all the bird on that one. "We know better, and you have no choice".

As a developer / designer, I hate MSs dominant position in the corporate world. Why? Sharepoint, that's why. I see good products and good developer/support teams being pushed out in favour of a "solution" that looks good on paper but is utter crap in practise, and rather expensive to run as well. The competent teams who used to support the products replaced by Sharepoint are being pushed out; in their place we get hordes upon hordes of so-called consultants. We have SP implementation consultants, IM consultants, Data consultants, ABCDE consultants; I have kind of lost track but I have yet to find someone remotely competent amongst them. Meanwhile the required server infrastructure is much larger, and our users have lost functionality compared to our old Wiki, forum and document management systems, some of which ran on software designed over 10 years ago. At this point we're solidly in the "throwing bad money after good" stage. It is almost (but not quite) as bad as SAP, and at least SAP does deliver on the backend and management layer.

So why hate MS for pushing out such a flawed product? I don't hate them for the product itself, but for the fact that it's almost impossible to make management see past the fact that it's "ohhhh Microsoft", past the fast-talking consultants, and the idea that it'll "integrate nicely".

*Fuck*. Why, after apparently 20 years, are we still having to explain this! So-called professional, intelligent people can't seem to grasp the fact that *bundling* is not problem. Bundling AND being in a monopoly position to enforce that bundle *is*. It's a logical AND. We're not talking mental gymnastics here, and you've had 20 years to understand, I would have thought a MS employee would especially be wanting to understand this. Jesus.

And don't think Google are somehow immune from this, Chrome on ChromeOS is fine since it's not in any way in a dominant position on operating systems, but using search monopoly to push their own products does have them currently in trouble with the EU.

I will admit that Microsoft's security is no longer the joke it was back in the 9x era, when they had only ineptly bolted multi-user support onto a single-user OS and suffered from their devotion to software backwards compatibility. But their business approach seems to have hardly altered. They still make heavy use of deliberate incompatibility, backroom deals and promotion via bundling. They are reluctant to support any technology they don't have the patents for (witness the h264 debacle, or the continued lack of native Vorbis support, or their pushing of the patent-encumbered exFAT filesystem, or IE's inability to handle animated PNG) and will support open standards only when they are so dominant as to leave no other option. The company is just very aggressive and underhanded in their approach to business.

Germany and Japan haven't invaded anybody in seventy years. Meanwhile, Microsoft is, even as we speak attempting to ram home an opaque, binary blob document format, OOXML (hilariously called "Open") as a standard over Open Document Format to cement MS Office's lock on office suite software.

I was at my first job, PC technician and we installed Macs for the graphical sector, and Compaq servers for Netware installation, also for the same.

For Apple and Compaq, I had to follow courses so that the company could get its preferenced dealer status.

In the income of the building, there hung a small plaque, Authorised Microsoft Dealer with Gates' signature. At first I thought that my boss had also done a course for MS to get this plaque.

However, in the course of time I saw that companies did not need to do much to get this plaque from MS. That's the day I realised the extent of Gates' snake oil dealership. Never trusted 'em from that day onward.

Windows 8 shows MS has not changed one bit.They still try and stuff crap down the throats of consumers and break stuff for developers and call it great.Hmm wonder is any ex-Microsoft execs work for Dice.

The US and Japan aren't still bombing each other. But Microsoft is still pulling the same stunts. In fact, they never stopped. They just kept doing it until it seemed normal and the government forgot why it was angry.

Nailing MS for bundling IE was like nailing an organized crime lord for tax evasion. Nobody with a clue actually cared about the browser bundling. They cared that Microsoft had been engaging in behavior which essentially amounts to bullying and corruption for the entire time they've existed. The Microsoft that exists now is not reformed; it's just a lot less powerful. It's still part of a very backwards tradition of corporate behavior where you get ahead not by making the best product but by setting up obstacles and shutting down everybody else who's trying to make something better. (See also: entertainment industry, fossil fuels industry, car industry,...) Corporations which behave that way should be treated like the dinosaurs they are, and shown the door to extinction.

I don't think that I know a single person who has mentioned the MS antitrust issue in maybe 5-10 years, except to mention that it might be happening to Google next. Tech people that I know generally hate MS for just abusing the crap out of their customers. Things like pushing out new operating systems to replace perfectly good operating systems. Things like rehashing Microsoft office over and over with their only "innovations" being things like the ribbon bar.

But if anything it would be the cost of licensing and the licenses themselves. I separate those two because just managing the licenses is a pain. The general consensus is that they make it a pain so that you get the all encompassing licenses that are "easier" so that now you just pay MS a tax on being in business.

Nearly 100% of the people that I know who are serious programmers have entirely moved their deployed products to OS solutions such as Linux and MariaDB and their development is generally done on an Apple or Linux PC as those most resemble the deployment platform.

I don't actually hate Microsoft and at one point was using Windows and Visual Studio to program.net desktop/web applications that used IIS and MSSQL. But then slowly but surely I migrated product by product to something Open Source until I realized that I was only using Windows XP because of inertia so I then dumped even that.

But for me the Open Source switch wasn't out of some religeous love of Open Source but that each one of the products was just way better than the MS equivalent for my use. Clients were perfectly happy to pay for any license issues so money wasn't even an issue, just a huge bonus. So it wasn't just that Open Source was better but that MS was actively becoming worse. Things like.net were bloating as they tried to tie every stupid MS product together in an attempt to trap me in their high priced eco system.

So I don't hate Microsoft (except for when they lie cheat and steal to prevent opensource from giving them the boot in large customers environment) I just don't have any interest in using any of their products. So even if all MS products were completely free and they stopped being bastards when places like Munich make the switch to OSS, I still wouldn't use them. In the same way that I wouldn't switch to a diet of low quality food even if it were free.

To forgive is foolish. Always be mindful of past actions, as history has proven its tendency to repeat.

I have not forgotten how MS came by its MS DOS, and how it tried to ensure incompatibility with DR-DOS. I haven't forgotten the stagnation and needless standards adoption of IE6 which stalled us on HTML4.01 for half the age of the Internet. I haven't forgotten UEFI, while Coreboot or a simple ability to flash the firmware with an OS loader stub would have sufficed and not required implementation of their patent encumbered FAT systems.

Speaking of which, I haven't forgotten their suits over FAT against companies employing Linux (with and without GNU). I haven't forgotten their extortionist patent threatening and pressuring Android device makers to pay MS for contributing nothing at all but "protection" from the MS threat. I haven't forgotten MS's part in the SCO debacle. I haven't forgotten the terrible anti-progress internal politics of MS which prevented us from having ClearType due to infighting from the MS Office team who wanted to be credited with it themselves -- despite sub-pixel rendering not being a novel thing, and yet MS applying for patents on it.

I haven't forgotten the long look down their noses at us users from MS W8 User Interface designers. I haven't forgotten the MS W8 app store who takes a 30% cut of application maker profits that they never needed before when they were focusing on their core competencies -- A cost which developers like myself will pass onto the users instead of eating ourselves, thus allowing MS to double dipping from their install base.

I haven't forgotten the needless inability for XBox Live games (Like Halo2) to not play online anymore, even though both XBoxes know we have the game in our consoles -- I could see it on the friends list of my peer whom I'm chatting with -- all to force players to move onto newer products and much later repurchase the artful games if they want to keep playing. A doubly needless cost since Hamachi or a VPN allows "system link" across the web without XBL fees, proving the XBL fees and game repurchasing are pointless forced obsolescence. I haven't forgotten the advertizements that showed up in the online non-services and in the OS that users PAY Microsoft for.

I haven't forgotten the bug riddled APIs and the less than helpful MSKB archives wherein users document said bugs themselves in the comments. I haven't forgotten the single constant byte value in Windows that needlessly limits the number of concurrent TCP connections so that MS can sell a Windows Server version. I haven't forgotten MS screwing over device partners over Surface. I haven't forgotten my MSDN subscription becoming worthless as I would not get early access to their OS for testing my products before release to end users -- the better to ensure MS's own software and distribution strategies become further entrenched vs competition.

I won't forgive humans that are actually remorseful, and you think that I'd forgive generations of abuse or that new generations would become instantly ignorant of reality? Go fuck yourself Microsoft, you're just feeling the tip of our ice berg. Have a nice death in obsolescence. Much in the same way the Internet you actively worked against by pushing your own business network protocol instead of supporting sees censorship as damage and routes around it, the market too sees oppressive non-features as damage and routes around such vendors given enough time. Even the most powerful of tyrants die, and when they do we tell tales of their evils ever after as a warning to any upstart of what end awaits evil.

Microsoft hasn't changed its standpoint on trying to take control of everyone's computing experience. I seen to recall the secure EFI mandate where only a signed OS could boot on a PC (e.g. Windows 8). There was plenty of Microsoft hate to go around as people thought that a Windows 8 PC/server could not boot an unsigned OS like Linux or BSD simply because it would be impractical for the open source communities to keep signing new kernels. And of course Windows 8 tried to force everyone to like MS tablets by making your desktop a clumsy tablet.

But here is my take. I have been using Windows since 3.1 on my 486DX 33MHz. Since Windows 2000 came out the stability has improved immensely and Windows 7 is probably the best yet. The bad windows days were the 95/98 and god help you if you had..... ME. It does what it needs to do and most problems are bought about by bad hardware or bad drivers which, IMHO is the leading cause of Windows butt-hurt. Sure its a virus magnet because of security problems but I have never been infected simply because I know better than to open a random email attachment. Its the clueless folks who contribute to the bot nets. There is plenty of free and opensource software for windows, open office, gimp, Inkscape, kicad etc that enables most people to only have to pay for windows and use free software. If you need professional software then you pay for it. Simple. I mainly use windows for playing games though that is less and less of an issue as I don't play as many games. I also use it for a drafting CAD program, kicad and keeping track of my financials using open office. If I need to quickly work in Linux I can run my Linux VM using Virtual box (I never liked dual booting, last time I did it was in the 90's to play DOS games on 6.22 along side Windows 95).

Do I use operating systems besides Windows? You bet. I run Linux on almost every other system I own: media center PC, laptop, spare PC and development PC. My little home server runs FreeNAS, so that is FreeBSD and my router runs m0n0wall, also BSD based.

People understand that corporations are amoral. The rational position towards a large, powerful corporation is distrust. That's the baseline from which a corporation has to work up from.

On top of that most people don't get a *choice* of Microsoft or something else; Microsoft is chosen *for them* by the corporate IT department or by the IT departments of people they have to work with. That's raises the bar for user experience, somethign MS is not particularly good at. It's like the food you get on a college meal plan. The fact you're forced to eat it means that if you're assigning it a letter grade you automatically deduct two letter grades: an A becomes a C and a B becomes a D.

Now consider Apple. There's a lot to dislike in their trying to position themselves as content gate keepers especially. But there are offsetting virtues: innovation, design, and build quality. On top of that most people who use Apple products choose to do so, which means they get a better evaluation.

Unfair? Maybe; but that's reality.

Now this is not to say that Microsoft has no virtues as a corporation, it's just that those virtues aren't experienced by *users*. Microsoft has consistently provided a mediocre user experience in its core products, and undermined the main value of their products to the user -- familiarity -- by pointless fiddling with user interfaces.

Microsoft's big sin was abusing its market position to achieve a monopoly with a mediocre product. To be forgiven of that sin, they've got to start producing products people love and look forward to, and don't feel let down by.

Better analogy. We've got them pushed back behind a DMZ and there hasn't been any shooting for three years now. But with every change in illustrious leaders, we all wonder what sort of belligerent crap they'll pull next.

There is a lot of software talent and good ideas at Microsoft. And like North Korea, they can't get out and will probably starve to death inside.

Okay, I'll burn what's left of my karma and point out the reason why we can't get along...because Microsoft HAS NOT CHANGED. They are still the price-gouging, competition stifling, astro-turfing, anti open standards, monopolizing enterprise that they have always been. What HAS changed is the rise of Mac OS X, iPad, Google Chrome, etc. that have created some real alternatives to Microsoft.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that comparisons to the Holocaust and world wars are in fact quite appropriate when discussing the magnitude of what Microsoft did to the history of computing, and by extension to human history overall.

The reason for this is simple. The effect of the Microsoft monopoly lasted so long and was so stultifying that it meant we will never know what a different word processor might be like. We will never know if spreadsheets or email might be more usable or efficient. We will never know (at least not in our lifetime) what an operating system or software might be like that doesn't use the conventions laid down by a company that had no incentive to make anything better, no need to design anything more than barely adequate, or to listen to its customers. Yet all these things are of fundamental importance to our lives - far, far too important to have suffered under a brutal, money-grubbing monopoly.

Despite (very) small innovations, Apple was not and is not a counter-balance because they were forced to ape the conventions that the Microsoft juggernaut had laid down with it's 95% market share. Jobs knew as well as anyone that it would be suicide to create anything that the market place was not already at least partially familiar with.

In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have. The blame lies of course with politicians and industry regulators who had no clue what an immense influence personal computing would have on society until it was too late. But it is too late. The die has been cast for personal computing for generations to come, and that is an utter and maddening tragedy for all of us.

The issue is of course far bigger than just one man, but holy mother of god do I hate what Bill Gates did to all of us.

1. artificial price tiers for various levels of crippling the code2. bug ridden bloated code with poor source control3. malware friendly due to constantly repeating the same basic amateur coding mistakes4. malware and spyware friendly due to design to accommodate marketers rather than end users, the large corporations and marketers are considered the true customers5. lack of basic functionality that other operating systems have built, money must be spent6. ignoring user needs while flying off on weird tangents and working in vacuum to produe rubbish UI (e.g. ribbon, metro)7. ignoring industry standard API, protocols and inventing inferior incompatible alternatives8. monopolistic and lock-in practices continue in the present

Are they really over it? Japan never had an issue with it. Never botherd them what they did in e.g. China. And the Americans still go on how I should be thankfull, because otherwise I would be speaking German.I do speak German (and several other languages) and the other alies don't bother me about that. (Thanks to ALL who helped, including later enemies.)

Nothing sets a mind into cement like being forced into something painful repeatedly.

It's called a "Conditioned Response" and becomes automatic. Hence the term "knee-jerk reaction".

People tend to teach their kids to avoid something that they had to learn the hard way in an attempt to spare them the suffering they had to endure themselves.

"What have they done?", you ask? Pushed flawed OSes out, forced upgrades that slow or break older systems, actively discontinued support for decent hardware (like printers and scanners) to force more purchases, yank support for older OSes that have been working in the industry in some capacity for years in a vain attempt to generate revenue, forcibly downgrade or out-mode existing suites of software that at least work (now that people have been forced to use them for so long) so that they will have to retrain in something completely different so they can simply continue to work, "bundling" software together in ways that make it obscenely difficult to remove without knocking down their house of cards...

Wash

Rinse

Repeat

Windows ME was a seriously flawed OS.

Windows Vista was as well.

Windows 8 has so far shown many of the same trends as it's failed predecessors, but M$ still pushes it out as if everyone never had to break the bank for the last two serious failures on their part, and wonders why people are slow to adopt anything new from them.

Seriously? We need to look at this with fresh eyes?

I'll be checking mine for a M$ logo before I adopt anything like that wetware into my body.

Let's skip over the hilarious hyperbole of comparing a business story to the prosecution of aggressive war (yes, managers love to *talk* about "crushing" opposition and evisceration and all that...all of which is hilarious hyperbole, too).

Taking it at face value - Japan had its whole regime torn down, warmongers mostly shot for war crimes, replaced with a whole different government and became a whole different culture that now votes heavily against any significant degree of aggressive militarization. If MS had *lost* that antitrust case and been broken up, managers scattered, their whole corporate culture changed, that would have been equivalent.

It wasn't just one thing - attempting to monopolize web browsers and make MS products the default choice for any web application was only a part of it. It was MS wanting to see all your product designs under non-disclosure before they'd offer to buy your company...and then the offer would be comically low and if you didn't take it, your general ideas would appear (badly) in a new Microsoft product that automatically took all your market share because...it was Microsoft.

Columnist "Robert X. Cringely" had a good term for it: "sharp trading" - always on the edge of illegal, but hard and expensive to prove as such. Nobody does business with the sharp trader twice....unless they're over a barrel.

Microsoft's *power* to do this has been reduced, but not their business model and inclinations. I have no choice but to use Office at work, and so I'm an enthused Excel VBA programmer, you make the best of what you've got. (And besides, writing a large critical application as a glorified spreadsheet macro is rare; it's just great for one-shot solutions.) But the very idea of basing a larger business system around SharePoint, their various Visual programming languages, their C# ripoff of Java, strikes me as comical; I'd go with platforms they don't control every time. MS has a long and continuing history of using their most-deeply-engaged customers the way shepherds use sheep - by which I mean "keep shearing them every year" of course. Honest.

Why can't we put it behind us? Simple: it's not really behind us. Microsoft is still a corporation run by hyperambitious sociopaths who care only for themselves and their "circle" and nothing for the common good. (I'm not saying MS is unique in this.) That hasn't changed as a result of the antitrust action or anything more recent. Microsoft is still "evil", they just haven't been [i]caught[/i] being evil in a while. It's a natural effect of the human condition that sociopaths rise to the top of all hierarchies, and then the rest of us suffer to degrees.

It realy goes back to the strategy of vendor lock in, Microsoft just can't pull it off like they used to because open source is so readily available and more viable than it's ever been.

The Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt propogated by Microsoft spans generations, and also can't make as strong a case as it used to because people know that there are alrternatives available.

Not so much about having a monooly on the desktop or bundling a browser, so much as it was about trying to leverage that to alter standards and control the source such that other browsers can't render what was made for IE 6, other office suites can't quite display a.DOC file like Office can. It was about making it so that things couldn't interact or be compatable.

Nothing has changed, MS just can't sell their FUD like they used to, and there's enough good open source alternatives that trying to extend something to control it just makes users loose interest. What's really sad is they still try to use this strategy even though it will no longer work, and this is why windows phone can gain no traction.

Best thing to do is use opensource, and let MS continue their downward decline into insignificance.

When I can buy a PC without Windows, without my supplier feeling pressured to include Windows on it, and the machine costs less...

Then I'll believe that Microsoft are allowing me to do what I want on my computer.

Also, you're a commercial entity. I have no reason to have to forgive you. If you supply a service that I'm not happy with, I have no reason to buy from you again. This is the difference between forgiveness, and actual redemption. I might forgive a mistake, but I don't trust you not to make it again until you proved you've changed your ways.

Judging by things like: I cannot buy a Linux PC. Despite Steambox. Despite Android. I just cannot buy a PC without your junk on it.

You're trying to subvert an open standard in my country with your OOXML crap - that we STILL know is just a crappy writing-down of your crappy binary format without any gestures whatsoever towards an actual, open format.

Samba still hasn't got up to the standard that you can trust it to do simple things, like take over from your Windows server - DESPITE the fact that you have been required by law to help open your formats, open your protocols and you claim to be "helping" them.

When I see a change of actions, I'll think about beginning to "forgive".

"Hey, I only murdered ONE market, a few decades ago, and tried to pretend I wasn't doing that... why won't you forgive me?"

Because, I have absolutely no need to. You're the ones that need to *earn* the forgiveness, not just expect it.

That's really, really reaching. Microsoft's current lineup is more than enough reason to hate them with a white hot hate. No nepotism involved. And this is speaking from the standpoint of thinking a few of their previous products are quite usable. Nope, sorry, blaming on culture or prejudice is at best disingenuous.

'I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome OS or Mobile Safari in iOS.

The browser bundling argument was always the lamest attack on MS. No other computing vendor has been forced to bend over like MS to provide browser alternatives. Nobody ever complained that Notepad and Wordpad were anti-competetive either. Microsoft certainly engaged in monopolistic practices (forcing OEMs to buy Windows licences) but bundling IE was a complete red herring.

It's funny how today nobody is up in arms about the "lock in" with bundled Safari, or Chrome, or WAP browsers on dumb phones. Particularly with iOS, Apple has an official policy of prohibiting alternate browsers that don't use the Safari rendering engine. Why aren't they being investigated for such anti-competetive behavior?

Hey Microsoft people don't like you coming up and demanding payment for FOSS code that they wrote that you have nothing to do with.
People don't like the fact that you spoke out against software patents when you had none yet you lobby to kill a bill reforming software-patents now that you have a ton of obvious software-patents. now you are one of the biggest supporters of software-patents.
Using the BSA in a draconian manner. See Ernie Ball.
Calling the hard work of people who write open source software a "cancer"
Corruption of standards committees in order to push a standard that not even you microsoft can honor
Constant lying and spreading FUD and misinformation in the marketplace.
Funding and aranging for additional funding for the SCO attack on Linux
Funding a book spreading lies that Linux was stolen from Minix
There is many many many more reasons.

The base problem for technologists is that the action perverted the course of future technology, and, having been altered, no amount of reparations will restore it to the course it would have taken had the event never happened.